Sleeping Alone

So, I've been sleeping with my Bible. Not falling asleep reading, kind of sleeping, but wrapping my arms around it and cuddling kind of sleeping. Crazy, I know, but what's a girl to do? For seven years there was a warm body in bed beside me - a body I loved, and trusted and teased and cried on and adored and then, there wasn't.
So I bought a new bed.
A great big bed with crisp white sheets and a dark curved headboard that looks like a fortress in my warm, orange room. But I feel a little lost, a little cold, a little sterile. I was talking to a priest a few months ago about sex and he said something about having to learn to live out his sexuality without being sexual. I wish I knew how that worked.
I miss sex.
I miss the blurred vision and the warm smell, the salt and the sounds. And of course the touch. Physical. Emotional. Spiritual. It is no wonder to me that a child is created within the fusion of those things. Something must come of that.
I remember when I first left my husband, the moment I realized that it would be years, if at all, that I would ever have sex again. I felt such panic - as if part of my self had been put on a shelf to sit and wait it out.
But that isn't exactly why I've been sleeping with my Bible. In those moments of panic and sterile loneliness I want a warm body, breathing beside me. God has been that warm body to my soul, but his skin is a little transparent and my feet are still so cold, so I grab my Bible and hold it instead. But the thing that really gets me is that I've been sleeping alone for almost a year and a half and it took me this long to make this connection to my Bible hugging: that I am Christ in that he is wearing my skin to hold the lonely and the cold. That I am the warm body and the safe hands and the quiet regular breathing to the panicky cries beside me. I hold my Bible to anchor me to the physical reality of God in the same way that I am to be the physical reality of God to others. Now, the reality of living that out is, of course, a little more complex than me sleeping with my Bible but I keep finding these beautiful truths in the middle of this new life that I never planned on living and the only thing I know to do is pull them all up to my chin and see how much room we can take up in that big, white bed of mine.